To kickstart our learning this term we watched the ABC program “Dragon’s Den” and Youtube clip “Young Inventors Ellen Degeneres”.

After watching these videos we had a quick chat about the inventions that were created and how useful they actually were.

In small groups, we each chose a picture of a ‘wacky’ invention. We had fifteen minutes to come up with a ‘made up’ story to explain what the invention is, how it works and why it was created. We then present our inventions and stories to the class. As a class we voted on the best inventions and why they were a great idea.

Like all inventors we have to critique our own product. We listed two possible pro’s and con’s for our own invention and recorded any improvements we would make, if any.

This lesson was used to help us understand how creative ideas and innovations can be used to solve problems and make things easier. This term we will be creating our own inventions to make life a little easier.

On Friday the Year Six students and the Year Two students spent some time together creating an acrostic poem.

The Year Two’s have been learning about different types of poetry so they taught their Year Six buddies what they knew. In return the Year Sixes taught the Year Two’s how to use PicCollage and insert text, photos and pictures.

It was a fun afternoon and we look forward to sharing more of our learning soon!

Over the last few weeks in Maths we have been exploring Chance and Data concepts. We were introduced to a new game called, “Greedy Pig’. We found this game fun and exciting and it kept us on the edge of our seats. We had a ‘wipe out’ number which we would change each round and this would take our score to zero. Each roll we could add the number shown onto our total or we could risk playing again.

Maths can be a lot of fun and playing a game is a great way to hone our skills and knowledge!

Over the last few weeks we have been learning all about silkworms and their life cycle. We all used our note-taking skills to gather some interesting information.

Did you know that one cocoon is made of a single 600m thread? Or that silkworms have no sense of smell? Did you know that the male moth that comes out of the cocoon dies after three days and the female dies after she had laid her eggs?

Our teacher was VERY impressed by our computer skills and by the way that everyone helped each other to problem solve.

Integrated Studies

This week, during Integrated studies, we have considered our needs verses our wants. One of our tasks was to go shopping using catalogues. We discussed the term ‘budget’ and we were each given $50 to spend. This money had to include needs and the aim was to get as much for our money as possible. We all loved this activity, however we realised that $50 doesn’t go a long way if you don’t carefully consider shop specials and necessities.

Our home task for this week was to consider the question, “What costs do you think are involved in running your home and paying for the needs and wants of your family?”. We have collected information from our parents about the costs that are involved in running their household and this information will be used in our next lesson.

Following on from our ‘Finding Humour’ activity, we looked at images of things that make us happy. As a class we looked at many different pictures of clowns and then shared things about them that makes us laugh. We all drew our own ‘happy clown’ and selected bright colours to carefully paint the picture. The clowns have been drawn with their arms open as they are going to hold a meaningful quote about happiness.

This term we are working with fractions, decimals and percentages. To begin the week we have learned a little more about equivalent fractions by playing the game, ‘Property Developer’. To play the game you need two players, two dice and some counters. The aim of the game is to occupy the most apartments by rolling the dice and making a fraction. If you roll a 2 and a 3 then you can make the fraction 2/3 therefore you can occupy two windows on a three bedroom apartment. If your partner has already occupied this apartment then you could make an equivalent fraction such s 4/6 or 8/12 and occupy those apartments instead. This game is great for getting us to recognise that different fractions actually represent the same amount.